


Faith (remixed)

by gretazreta (Greta)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-12
Updated: 2009-09-12
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:42:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greta/pseuds/gretazreta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say there are no atheists in a foxhole, but the reverse might also be true. John Winchester, pre-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faith (remixed)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kamikaze_remix 2009, from maharetr's "You are not long here".

‘73

He found God, sort of, in the Mekong Delta in 1973. It was hell, after all, and as they crouched together in impenetrable darkness, the jungle full of eyes around them, anything seemed possible. Everything was fleeting; everything was eternal; day and night were both the same - thick wet heat on the skin, the sweet burn of smoke in the lungs. Everyone found religion in Vietnam, one way or another: between the spit-thin leaves of the little regulation-issue bibles, or in what was left of the small Buddhist shrines after the napalm had licked through them, or in the hash-pipe or the needle or the sticky embraces of Madame Cho's girls, or the close grip of other men.

The only thing that made any sense was the picture in John's head that never faded, even as the photograph in his pocket wore thin around the edges. The stubborn line of her jaw, a flash of bright eye, hair turned gold under the street-lamp outside the diner the night before he'd shipped out. 

"Don't go," she’d said, "We'll go to Canada. Start fresh." He had to, and they both knew it. His number had come up, and so he must go, or someone else would have to, and that was harder to live with than leaving.

"I won't wait for you," she’d said, "I'll go out and sleep with every man I see." She'd buried her face in his hair, after that, and he'd held her close as she refused to cry over him.

She'd lasted nearly a month before relenting and sending him the first letter.

"Everything's the same and nothing is," she wrote. "Nothing means anything when you're not here." He folded the envelope carefully, and held it in his pocket with her photo, and prayed that if he returned he'd still be the man she'd kissed goodbye.

 

‘74

The first time he talked to Jim Murphy, John hadn't slept in three days. He'd taken first watch, and second and third, the cold metal of his rifle warming against his skin. Every time he shut his eyes he saw it all again, played out in living color, slow motion, high definition: the little girl's face, the flames, Carter's unbelieving stare as he tried to stuff his own intestines back into the wreck of his body.

The night was never still: there was the constant shrieking of insects, the distant rumble of heavy ordnance. The stench of gasoline was heady in the air. Murphy was a silent presence at his side, thin as a whip, a fresh-faced new kid with dark eyes and a silver cross glinting next to his dog-tags. 

"There was nothing you could have done," Murphy said, after an interminable time, and John wanted to reach out and strike him. Because of course there wasn't, and that was so very far from the point.

"How can you keep on..." John asked, after a moment, with a clumsy gesture towards Murphy's cross. "How can you see a five-year-old kid blow herself and some Okie farm-boy to bits and think there's still someone in charge of this?"

Murphy shrugged. "I just do," he said, stubborn in a way that John hadn't yet come to recognize. "Sometimes life is a test of faith. Maybe always. I don't know. I might die here, you might, or we might get home. But either way, I believe it's part of the plan. I don't have to understand it, what it's for, why this shit is all happening. How could I? How could anyone?"

"That's the stupidest argument I ever heard," John replied, and Murphy let his head fall back in a wide-mouthed laugh. His bottom row of teeth was crooked.

"Stupider to think that this is just random," Murphy replied. "Seriously, this shit is way too fucked-up to just happen."

They sat in silence a long time.

"You got a girl at home?" Murphy asked, finally, and John found himself handing over the precious picture.

Murphy had looked a long moment, then handed it back, carefully. "You see, that's faith," he said, and John rolled his eyes. "Something to believe in beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in. What's her name?"

"Mary," John said, and Murphy grinned in delight. "There you go," he said, as if the chance coincidence of name proved his point. "Perfect."

John looked down at the photo, and tried to remember what her laugh sounded like.

"Get some sleep," Murphy said. "I'll keep an eye out." And reluctantly, John did. Lying back, letting his eyes fall shut at last, he could hear Murphy saying a blessing over him. He was a weird kid, but it was oddly comforting.

 

‘76

Jim Murphy stood up with him the day he got married, two years later. Mary wasn't a serene bride, driven on as always by some force he'd never understood. She walked alone down the aisle in her mother's wedding dress, determined and focused and so beautiful his words caught in his throat when it came to saying the vows. 

He held her in his arms that night, his wife, and she traced the tattoo he'd got in Saigon the night before he left, and her mouth was fierce on his. They whispered to each other in the dark, afterwards, about their plans, about their life together. She fell asleep before he did, and he rested his head against her breast, and thanked God for everything he had, this life, this future.

 

‘79

After shipping back, he never felt scared, not really. He'd seen every horror the world had to offer. There was nothing left to fear. 

That changed the day their first child was born, and Mary placed Dean in his hands, a tiny fragile little bundle of skin and chalky bones, eyes bright and demanding in a squashed little pug of a face, staring up at him like John was the one under inspection. He knew he'd do anything, then, anything at all, to protect this scarlet-faced squalling little thing - his son- go back to 'Nam, or worse, if that's what it took. He went straight from the hospital room to the nurse's chapel, and bargained on his knees. Anything. He'd do anything.

 

‘83

Mary burned, beautiful to the end, wreathed in flames of gold and blue. 

"Your God did this," he yelled at Jim, later, baby Sam sleeping fitfully in a crib made out of a dresser drawer, and Dean silent and wakeful in Jim's spare room. "Your God let this happen."

Jim looked less certain that John had ever seen him, somehow reduced, eyes familiar and dark in the pale face with the new beard that Mary teased him about not a month before.

"What did you see?" Jim asked, and John told him, and his tears came out black with the soot from his burnt house, his burnt wife, his burnt future. 

 

‘88

It had been a hard, dirty hunt, and they finally cornered the Lamia in the cemetery when the moon was at its height. The wind lifted her long hair above her head as she shifted shape, over and over, in front of them. She came as his mother, first, white and frail like John remembered from the last drawn-out days of her illness; then as Mary, dressed in fire; then as the advertising executive he'd failed to save in Wyoming; as the mother-of-four he'd lost to a werewolf in upstate New York. She pulled the images out of his mind as easily as leafing through a family album.

She settled, finally, in the shape of a five-year-old Vietnamese girl, just as John had seen her in his nightmares so many times, face squinted-up against the sun. She'd smiled, running forward to greet them. He'd noticed the live grenade in her hands too late for action – they all had. She'd found it in a rice field, maybe, or in a ditch, or the jungle - any-damn-where - a cold dark toy for little fingers. And she came running. And tripped, and fell, skinning both knees and somehow, in the tumble, pulling the pin.

He couldn’t fire now, as he couldn't then, the shotgun useless in his hands.

"You'll go to hell, John Winchester," she said, in a knowing voice so strange out of the little girl's mouth, and he remembered the lore too late: the Lamia, the shape-shifting, soul-sucking prophetess of legend. "You'll go to hell, and so will your boys, one by the bright road, and one by the dark. They'll burn like their mother, and so will you. You'll burn, all of you. All of you."

The shot rang out from behind him, and in death the glamor of the little girl faded to show the creature's true form, wrinkled and ancient. He turned to see Jim Murphy, lowering his shotgun, with a sick look on his face. He wondered who Jim had seen.

"They lie," Jim said, much later, after they had burned the remains, but John didn't answer.

**

He couldn't return to Jim’s house after that. He took refuge instead from the howling wind inside the church, breathing in the familiar forgotten smells, the lingering taint of candle smoke, of incense and flowers. He lit candles, one by one, mindless, surprised underneath it all that he could still enter here, that the hallowed ground didn't turn against him and spit him out. He was dirty, so dirty, all the way through, soul as black as the graveyard dirt embedded under his fingernails.

He thought of his boys sleeping in the twin beds of Jim's spare room, utterly unable to face them with all his sins so heavy upon him. Dean with his serious face and slapstick bravado, Sammy with his hunger for knowledge and surprising thoughtfulness: his boys. Mary's boys. 

They lie, Jim had said. She lied.

To hell, all of them. John wondered, numbly, if he'd ever be able to think of Mary again, without remembering her this way, burning so brightly, and telling him his doom with a smile of satisfaction on her tortured mouth, her face morphing into the little girl who died with along with Carter that day in the village.

He was bare inside, scraped quite raw. He buried his face in his hands and tried to pray, for comfort, for forgiveness, tried and tried again to find the words that he had once found in the worst place on earth, right back when everything was still beginning.

Our father, he began, Our father who art. Who art. 

The words were thick in his mouth, thick and suffocating like a mouthful of fatty meat. They wouldn't come, not in any of the languages he knew them in, the syllables heavy and lifeless on his tongue.

The wind rattled at the windows, and the candles cast living shadows across the floorboards.

He knew it then, with sudden and absolute clarity. No one was listening. No one was there.

The church was empty; there was only darkness outside it. God wasn't listening. God was gone, had been gone for some time, and John’d been a fool to believe otherwise, just another fool like Jim, trying to persuade himself that it all meant something, trying to make sense of the chaos and evil all around him.

He wept, then, for all his grievous losses, for the death of love, the end of all his hopes, for Mary, who would never see the way Dean had grown, who would never hear Sam's voice, for Sam and Dean with their bleak future, for his boys, for himself. For the final, inescapable death of faith, and for the sheer unrelenting loneliness of it all.

**

When there was nothing left to weep for, he rubbed his face on his dusty shirt, and turned toward the house. The stairs creaked as he walked up, bootless, too exhausted for real stealth. The second door on the left at the top was the boys', and he pushed the door open, gently. Just for a second – just one quick look to see them sleeping.

Dean, though, was instantly awake, sitting up so quickly that John was pretty sure he'd been waiting up. Dean looked straight at him, arms outstretched for a hug, and John sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and took him in his arms. Dean's face was cold against John's, and John kissed his ear and his cowlick and hugged him close and tight, feeling Dean's heart beating fast against his own.

"It's all right, Dad," Dean whispered, almost silently, so as not to wake Sam. He pressed his face firm against John's chest. "It's going to be all right." 

John tried to speak, but the lump in his throat forbade it, and he blinked hard against a second blurring of the tears that had seemed completely used up minutes before. Through the shadows, John could see Dean's lip trembling. He'd seen that look on his face many times before, usually directed towards his brother: reassurance so sincere it was hard not to believe him. 

"I know, sweetheart," John lied, voice soft, trying hard to believe his own words.

"Try and get some sleep," he whispered. "Sammy will be up at six, no matter how late the rest of us fall into bed." Dean's eyes crinkled in something resembling a smile, because that part, at least, was true, and settled himself back down amongst the tangled sheets in his customary position, curled towards the small lump in the other bed where Sam was buried under the covers.

John tucked him in, encasing Dean's small form in the comforter, and stood to go.

"You sleep too," Dean said, voice stern, and John nodded and stroked his hair.

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

**

It was another promise John couldn't keep. He saw Mary, saw the little girl, saw Dean and Sam in flames as well, hellfire licking around them. He tossed and turned and shifted, sick with self-loathing. He was bad news; he couldn't even keep a promise to a nine-year-old boy.

Morning brought a watery slick of sunshine cutting through low cloud, Jim's scrambled eggs and coffee that couldn't dispel the fog in his brain. Dean was quiet and watchful, with thin streaks of grey under his eyes like bruises, and John wondered if Dean'd been able to keep his side of the bargain either. Sam was puffy-eyed and rebellious, chasing his eggs around the plate with his spoon until they were well beyond cold. 

John loved them both, so much that it burned, an ache in his chest. He felt defenseless and weak from it, jittery with loss and a horrible sort of indecision: a listless puppet with cut strings. Tomorrow he’d decide. Tomorrow they’d work out what to do next, where to go. 

The boys stuck to him like magnets, as though they'd made some kind of silent agreement not to let John out of their sight. The three of them sat on the old couch on the verandah, listening to the intermittent showers of rain on the roof, Sam curled up on his lap and Dean clinging against his side.

Sam was heavy, and his hair smelled like milk. John could feel Dean's long quivering breaths that slowed as they sat there all tangled up together, slowed more and more, until Dean's eyes drifted closed and his head rested, slack, against John's shoulder.

The only sound was Sam's muffled little snores, and the rain, and John’s own heartbeat in his chest, Dean's sharp chin digging into him and Sam's arms clasped around his neck. 

Sam stirred in his arms, and John whispered a nothing against his hair, and watched with a half-smile as Dean reached out in his sleep to grip Sam’s hand.

They were his reason, he thought. For better or worse, they were his reason to keep on going, somewhere, towards something. They’d figure it out, somehow. Between them. There was really no other option. He had no ideas left.

The rain was lulling, soft, and sweet. He was tired, that was all. So damn tired.

After a while, he slept, too.

**  
END


End file.
